The World Trade Center aftermath and its effects on health: Understanding and learning through human-exposure science

Although a relatively young field, human-exposure science should be central to the mitigation of exposures during and after catastrophic events such as the WTC terrorist attacks. Lioy and colleagues discuss the issues associated with application of conventional environmental measurements to the WTC aftermath as surrogates for exposure, how the divergent exposure periods cascaded into unusual adverse health observations, and the degree of follow-through on the lessons learned from the WTC collapse.